George Orwell’s MI5 dossier revealed
‘George Orwell’s left-wing views and bohemian clothes led British police to label him a communist – but the MI5 spy agency stepped in to correct that view, the writer’s newly released security file reveals.
The secret file that MI5 kept on the author from 1929 until his death in 1950 is being declassified today by the National Archives.
It reveals that in contrast to the fictional “Big Brother”, the cruel and all-seeing secret police of Orwell’s classic 1984, MI5 took a surprisingly benign view of the writer.
Orwell savaged the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Russia in Animal Farm and 1984.
But he was also a socialist who railed against inequality in earlier works such as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. [..]
MI5 had already been watching Orwell since 1929, when he was a struggling journalist in Paris, attempting to write for left-wing publications.’
